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Garden

The formal garden at the Nassau County Museum of Art was
designed in the 1920s by Marian Cruger Coffin, one of America's
leading landscape architects. She considered this garden,
designed at the peak of her career, to be one of her finest
designs. Coffin's career happily coincided with the "county
house era," when a great country estate with a beautiful garden
was a necessary attribute for wealthy Americans modeling
themselves on their European counterparts. Mr. and Mrs. Childs
Frick, who called this estate "Clayton," hired Coffin to
re-design an existing 450-foot rectangular flower garden.
Coffin's overall plan for the garden was to strengthen, clarify,
and enhance the existing arrangement of walks, flower beds,
hedges, and entrances, using rectangles, circles, and arches to
mirror the shapes found in the symmetrical design of the
estate's mansion.

Before the end of her career, Coffin had undoubtedly foreseen
the eventual deterioration of her ephemeral creation. She helped
to teach, in fact, that while the product of an architect is
static, the compositions of a landscape architect are constantly
changing. When Nassau County purchased the estate from the Frick
family in 1969, the garden became a public garden, its
maintenance dependent on volunteer labor and private donations.
The magnificent teak trellis was restored by the Roslyn Landmark
Society in 1989; in 1993, extensive brick path restoration as
well as a plan for restoring the garden were made possible by
funding from New York State's Environmental Quality Bond Act.
Actual restoration of the garden began in 2000, thanks to a
generous gift from Peggy N. Gerry in memory of her husband,
Roger G. Gerry, and is an ongoing project.

The garden today provides a sanctuary of carefully reconstructed
brick paths, perennial borders, and intricate boxwood designs in
four garden rooms, demarcated by yew "walls." It is an elegant
space to be admired by lovers of landscape architecture, studied
by historic preservationists, but most of all, a place to
stroll, sit, and enjoy nature in a setting designed by a master
landscape architect.

You can help support the gardens with a Garden Membership and
with naming opportunities in the following manner: